"A combination of both shutter and aperture priority modes"?Originally Posted by Joel Eade
I'm not quite sure whether you are just giving this feature a different formulation, or whether I didn't explain the feature well enough for it to be fully understood.
It's just a shortcut that, for every click of one wheel in one direction, automatically does a click of the other wheel in the other direction, so that you keep the same exposure...
That sounds an awful lot like...P Mode. In P mode, rotating the main dial reciprocally adjusts shutter speed and aperture.
You could assign mode change to M.Fn, and restrict modes to just M and P, and that would get you there (as a 'bonus' you get EC with the quick dial in P).
It does? Seems that I haven't used P-Mode in a while :-)
I would still want the initial exposure to be selected manually, however when I switch from M to P the current exposure settings aren't copied, I'm back in automatic exposure land!
Frankly, it's just too complicated for me. I think you need to decide if you want manual exposure or not. If you do, IT'S MANUAL. If not, IT'S (possibly SEMI-)AUTOMATIC. Of course AE is useless in M...unless you turn a wheel, the exposure is already locked.
How are you arriving at this initial manual exposure that you want to lock? Are you making a rough guess, then taking a shot, and reviewing it on the screen w/ histogram? Are you relying on the camera's meter and watching the triangle in the viewfinder? Honestly you might want to try P with exposure compensation, then spin the little wheel to adjust your aperture/shutter pair.
We're a Canon/Profoto family: five cameras, sixteen lenses, fifteen Profoto lights, too many modifiers.
Good point, especially coupled with the 1-series capability to specify ranges (min/max) for shutter speed and aperture.
What I'm suggesting is not an automatic or semi-automatic exposure. I'm running around somewhere, shooting in M as usual. At some point I want to change the depth-of-field but the exposure I chose earlier and was shooting at was already correct. So when I change the aperture to change the dof I need to compensate by changing the exposure time. So I for every click of one wheel I need to click the other wheel, too. The EV-Lock, while engaged, would automatically perform this compensating change to the second wheel. No automatic exposure, it's still all M, it sounds like you are reading too much into this feature.
For the record, no, I'm not reading too much into this. I get it completely. I just don't understand the logic behind "give me full control of the camera, using the knobs at my disposal, across the three dimensions of the exposure triangle. Great, thanks. Now stop and give me a macro so I can turn one knob and not have to turn another knob, because I'm too lazy to do so myself after turning them just a moment ago." Further, I think it's a short-sighted assumption to think that the 327 1Dx customers who might want this would want the macro to only pair up aperture & shutter - some are going to want aperture & ISO as the mated pairing, and others are going to want shutter & ISO as the mated pairing. Now it's not so simple...
We're a Canon/Profoto family: five cameras, sixteen lenses, fifteen Profoto lights, too many modifiers.
You are right. Of course what I really want is the camera to implement a scripting language. Expose all features as functions in that scripting language. Let me assign a custom script to all buttons. Then I can do some true 21st-century-style customisation. The technology is available and, as I have had the opportunity to experience in a reasonably similar context, easy to implement. The customisation we are getting now is still very old-school and is not using the possibilities we have today to really go beyond the customisation paradigm of 20 years ago. It's quite sad in a multi-thousand-dollar device when many other areas with unit costs down to at least double-digit prices have already transitioned to expose the general-purpose processing capabilities that they have for customisation. It's a logical step. Once you implement too many individual things it's better to jump to the next level and implement one thing at a higher level of abstraction. No more need to explicitly limit which functions can be mapped to which buttons etc...
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